The Creditably is in the Details

When I saw “a family memoir on the front cover of Beth Alvarado’s Anthropologies I wasn’t quite sure what that meant. Aren’t all memoirs some sort of history of a family, or at least of one member of that family? Then I wondered how she was going to be able to speak for her family, do them justice, my own anxieties as the writer in my family were already clouding my reading before I had even started.

Once I got into the book it became clear how she was going to do this. From the first page she says about her mother, “she wants to tell me her stories, and every time I come to bring her groceries or make her soup or take her to see a doctor, she revises them.” This sets up everything. It shows us a pattern that is seen throughout the memoir. The narrator is being told these stories, especially the ones that do not involve her, and is sharing them with the reader. And as she shares them with the reader she has the ability to set the circumstances of a situation in a very concise way, letting the reader in subtle on what is happening and making us feel like we are there. She does this a couple of different ways but here it is through listing the activities she does for her mother: grocery shopping, cooking, doctors’ appointments. As readers we now know she is at least in part taking care of her mother, but she didn’t have to tell us it out right.    

Later in the memoir we see she is not only the receiver of stories in her own family but in Fernando’s as well. She says of Dora, “I think Dora tells me these stories simply because I am a willing listener.” The pattern is shown again, and now as readers, because this isn’t the first instance this has happened, Beth is given the credibility to speak about a family she wasn’t born into.

If there was any doubt about the reliability of the narrator, Beth has some interesting ways of grabbing hold of credibility. First off when she isn’t sure of a detail she states that she isn’t sure like she did in the scene when her and Fernando are riding home from dinner with her parents, “Look, he says, I don’t need a white savior. (but maybe that was on another night.) thanks anyways, he says.” This is a very tense scene, and Beth risks interrupting it to stick to the “truth” that makes the narrator creditable. As a reader now we will take what she says as “truth” because if it wasn’t she would state the uncertainty.

If as a reader you were still wondering how she is able to render such lively details of the lives of people who lived generations before her, like her grandparents and great grandparents, Beth subtlety gave the reader the answer to that question in more than one place.

In a section in part two at Johnny’s funeral it says, “I was a traveler, only half in the world, recording, remembering what I could see, relying on images.” She is referring to her not speaking Spanish, but it is a wonderful metaphor for someone who collects people’s stories. Collecting them isn’t enough; one has to be able to render them to life. In the conversation with Dora, Beth as the narrator explains to the reader how she is able to render them to life and how a “family memoir” is even possible to write, “I love the way whole histories open up before my eyes, one or two details and I can imagine a life.” She managed to imagine several.

Best,

CF